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“The Head of All These Kingdoms”The Watchtower—1961 | May 15
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thirteenth century B.C., along with Jericho, as the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the Holy Land. The pottery discovered, he said, places Joshua’s campaign about 3,300 years ago, which coincides with the Biblical account. . . .
“For the last four years, Dr. Yadin has headed the James A. de Rothschild–Hebrew University archaeological expedition at the northern Galilee site. He has uncovered the remains of twenty-one cities. . . . His excavations, Dr. Yadin said, indicated that the greatest of the twenty-one cities, and probably the largest in Canaan, was the Hazor that Joshua conquered and burned. . . . The excavations of Hazor, Dr. Yadin said, indicated that the city fitted the brief Biblical description as ‘the head of all those kingdoms.’ ‘Joshua’s Hazor was a city of approximately 150 acres; it could have held 25,000 to 30,000 people,’ Dr. Yadin said. ‘We can gather some idea of its impressive size for those days when we realize that Megiddo, the famous fortress city guarding the Valley of Jezreel—Armageddon—covered only some fifteen acres, and the Jerusalem of King David’s time, centuries later, covered about ten acres.’”
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Questions From ReadersThe Watchtower—1961 | May 15
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Questions From Readers
● What did Jesus mean by the words, “You are mistaken, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God; for in the resurrection neither do they marry nor are they given in marriage”? (Matt. 22:29, 30) What is contained in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Sadducees should have known about the resurrection and not marrying in it?—A. E., United States.
The Sadducees did not believe in a resurrection, as is clear, not only from the Gospel accounts, but also from the record at Acts 23:6-10, which tells of the strife between the Pharisees and Sadducees that Paul caused by stating that he believed in the resurrection of the dead. The tricky question the Sadducees asked, about a woman having had seven brothers in succession as husbands and whose wife she would be in the resurrection, was meant to prove Jesus mistaken, but he turned the tables on them and proved them mistaken. In doing so Jesus could have quoted from many scriptures showing that the dead would arise, such as the words of Job (14:13-15), Hosea (13:14), Daniel (12:13) and others. But because the Sadducees held that only the Pentateuch was inspired, Jesus used the words of Jehovah to Moses at the burning bush to prove his point.—Matt. 22:31, 32.
This was really a master stroke on the part of Jesus, for the Sadducees prided themselves on knowing the Pentateuch and yet they had not seen in it the clear implication of the resurrection that Jesus pointed out to them. They had not gained the import of what God said to Moses at the burning bush to indicate that he, Jehovah God, is the Deity, not of the dead, but of the living. For the then dead Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to live again to worship their common God they would have to experience a resurrection from the dead. Jehovah God was equal to this miracle of the resurrection of the dead.—Ex. 3:6.
The fact that God had the resurrection power had been illustrated even by Jesus himself as the Son of God prior to the time that the Sadducees tried to stump Jesus with their tricky question. For these patent reasons Jesus could straightforwardly tell these Sadducees that they were not so smart after all, that they were wrong in discounting the resurrection of the dead and that their being mistaken on this score was because they did not know either the Scriptures by Moses, and the rest of the prophets, or the miracle-working power of God.
Jesus easily cut through their resurrection problem by informing the Sadducees that those who will be resurrected to life on earth neither marry nor are given in marriage, and hence there will exist no question as to whose wife the woman will be who in this old world had seven brothers successively as her husband. Jesus thus showed that, though the Sadducees were familiar with the recorded Scriptures, particularly the law of Moses, they had no real knowledge of their meaning and prophetic
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